From Monterey to Colorado, Hawaii to the Massachusetts coast, President Barack Obama has used his executive authority to establish more than two dozen national monuments — historic sites and scenic places where logging, mining, oil drilling and commercial fishing are often limited.

For more than a century, the ability of presidents to use that authority has given birth to a wide range of national parks, including the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, Zion in Utah and Grand Teton in Wyoming, at times triggering raging controversies.

Now that may significantly change.

In a potential landmark shift in U.S. environmental policy, Republicans in Congress are pushing to rein in the 110-year-old law that gives presidents the power to establish national monuments without approval from Congress. The platform approved at this summer’s Republican National Convention calls for no new monuments unless Congress and state legislatures approve. And President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to roll back many of Obama’s executive actions starting his first day in office Jan. 20. Last month, Trump sharply criticized Obama during a campaign stop in Maine for establishing a new national park on 87,500 acres of land donated to the federal government in Maine’s North Woods over the objections of loggers and some rural landowners.

“This decision, done at the stroke of a pen without the support of the local community, undermines the people that live and work right here in Maine,” said Trump on Oct. 15 in Bangor.

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“Many of these bedrock environmental laws have withstood the test of time,” said Alan Rowsome, senior government relations director for the Wilderness Society. “They are supported by the public. We will fight tooth and nail to ensure that these laws will remain for future presidents to protect special places.”

Not so fast, say Republicans. Obama and other presidents have put “Draconian restrictions” on public lands, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Roseville, said Tuesday.

“I would expect Congress will attempt to reclaim its constitutional authority,” he predicted.

Two weeks ago, McClintock, whose district stretches from Lake Tahoe to Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, sent a letter to Obama, signed by three other Western GOP House leaders, urging him not to establish a new national monument in the Sierra Nevada, as has been rumored, or any other places in Oregon and California. Monuments have limited logging, which is needed to reduce fire risk by thinning overgrown forests, they said, and could block construction of future reservoirs in some national forest areas.

“This abuse of power means the public is largely forbidden from enjoying traditional recreational pursuits on the public lands, including snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, shooting, off-highway vehicle use,” they wrote.

At issue is the 1906 Antiquities Act. The law, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt to reduce looting and theft of pottery and other artifacts in New Mexico and other areas, gives presidents the power to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” as national monuments by proclamation.

Trinidad Head, a rocky promontory near Humboldt, Calif., is among six areas under consideration by President Barack Obama to be named as a national monument. Courtesy David D. Cooper/Conservation Lands Foundation

Nearly every president has used the law to establish monuments, and many eventually were upgraded by Congress to become national parks. Roosevelt used it to set aside the Grand Canyon, Herbert Hoover used it to protect Arches in Utah and Death Valley in California, and President George W. Bush used it to set aside vast areas of the remote Pacific Ocean, including the world’s deepest location, the Marianas Trench.

But many rural Western leaders have chafed at its breadth. When President Bill Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah in 1996 on 1.9 million acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, it killed plans for a huge coal mine there. Clinton ended his presidency with a flurry of new monuments, including Giant Sequoia and Carrizo Plain in California, and environmentalists are urging Obama to do the same.

“We hope with the change in administrations that we will make it across the finish line,” said Fred Keeley, a board member of the Sempervirens Fund, a Los Altos environmental group.

The group is advocating for Obama to establish a new national monument at Coast Dairies, a 5,843-acre expanse of federally owned land along Santa Cruz County’s rural north coast near Davenport. Keeley, who plans to travel to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks to increase advocacy, said his main concern is that the Trump transition team will ask the Obama White House to halt new executive actions.

Others have wondered if Trump could revoke monuments by executive order. Legal experts say probably not. No president has ever revoked a monument. And the Antiquities Act does not contain a process for doing it. In 1938, U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings issued an opinion stating that presidents cannot revoke monuments. But the issue has never been tested in court.

Wilderness Volunteers cut invasive Russian olive trees along the riverbanks of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah.

Congress, however, could certainly undo monuments, said John Leshy, former chief attorney for the U.S. Interior Department.

“It’s a little early and Trump is such a wild card,” said Leshy, now a professor emeritus at the UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. “It depends on whether the hotheads or the cooler heads will prevail, and whether the general public, who mostly seem to love conserved public lands, will let their elected representatives hear from them.”

Paul Rogers has covered a wide range of issues for The Mercury News since 1989, including water, oceans, energy, logging, parks, endangered species, toxics and climate change. He also works as managing editor of the Science team at KQED, the PBS and NPR station in San Francisco, and has taught science writing at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

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